Title

Author(s)

Role

John M. Kirk

Files

Document Type

Book

Description/Summary

Guerrilla-priests and liberation theology are not new phenomena in Nicaragua. Ever since the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, Catholic Church leaders have played a major role in that country's politics. The result, John Kirk writes, is a polarized church, one with a progressive minority at loggerheads with the conservative hierarchy. Kirk sets each stage of the church-state debate in a historical continuum, then examines the forty-year period of Somocismo and the Sandinista period (1979-90) that followed. This social revolution - blending nationalism, Marxism, and Catholicism - dared to be different, he claims, and accordingly it paid the price. Kirk wrote this book following three trips to Nicaragua during the 1980s, when he witnessed firsthand the social polarization occurring at the time. But the involvement of the Catholic Church in Nicaraguan politics is not exceptional, he says: "Most - if not all - religions are also encumbered with socio-political concerns that go beyond the essentially 'religious.'"

ISBN

9780813011387

Publication Date

1-1-1992

Publication Information

Kirk, John M., Politics and the Catholic church in Nicaragua. Gainesville, FL : University Press of Florida, c1992.

Rights

Copyright: University Press of Florida, c1992.

Recommended Citation

Kirk, John M., "Politics and the Catholic church in Nicaragua" (1992). Walter J. Petry Book Gallery. 35.
https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/petry-books/35